Mixed teams of worldwide talent: how not to fail?

While all chatter is about AI these days, innovation is still made by humans — in an ideal case, a nice variety of them. Finding top talent is a dire challenge of HR today, but making a constellation of diverse talent work is where the gateway to magic is or where the possibility of disastrous pitfall lies.

Juli Mata - Product-Service Strategy Consultant

Published in

UX Collective

13 min readApr 6, 2023

This is a story of how the most amazing talent pool went South despite all Silicon Valley tested processes and the takeaways for all of us to learn from.

The ideal framework for innovation

The field of product design has been loud from buzzwords; design thinking, service design, business design have become hot topics of the day. Companies along with people are trying to acquire these skills and build them into their daily practice. Multidisciplinary and cross-silo team work has long been coming and been promoted via design thinking thanks to Ideo and Tim Brown (read a nice article about it here from 2008). Then, the appearance of agile helped normalize it in daily work by demanding more interaction and more proximity between otherwise very different roles in the process.

Design has been divided into an ecosystem of different jobs like UX, UI — and the number keeps growing. The market still has a challenging time to understand what all these jobs do including HR to recruit and then to manage. (Here is a lovely article written by my friend, fantastic design manager Jason Mesut who has done pioneering work in this field.)

Companies started to recognize how adapting design into their processes is measurable in their performance. The idea of design maturity was born and it is becoming a quality to attain. (More about this from the NNGroup here or by the BCG group for business people here or a lovely older article from 2017 on UX Collective here.)

The most recent development on the talent market happened with the arrival of Covid: with all the damage it did it also legitimized remote work. And just like that, companies gained access to a world-wide market of knowledge — while they had no practical experience how to manage it well. Classic employment contracts restrict opportunities for how they might hire someone but with the growing base of digital nomads, freelance, consulting work the road has opened up to bring a wide variety and knowledge in. Businesses have sprung up to meet and overcome administrative challenges with these needs, like Toptal, but how to do it well is still in progress.

I painted the picture to show: to be a successful design-led company in innovation is no small quest in 2023. A lot of the know-how is fairly recent while the demand for innovation has never been so high. It is not easy to build a team that has it all and can do it right.

These principles have been around only for only a short period of time and with every new thing it takes time for them to filter into the culture and be adapted on a wide scale.

The Scene

Design professionals long to find a workplace that represents all these design conscious values, but they are not easy to come by. When I was approached by a company that fit this profile to join them as a consultant, I was very excited to see how it is from the inside.

An organization with a humanitarian mission, a diverse international workforce and a mature design culture; a product-service ecosystem that is present globally but originates from their Scandinavian roots — this company represents the holy grail of service design. I have been looking for an opportunity to work with them, but pre-covid, there was a strict no remote policy but Covid brought these walls down and I was invited to work with them on a continuous basis.

I joined an already distributed team with members from Norway, Sweden, Denmark, India, Luxemburg, Egypt, Estonia, Holland, Croatia and the USA — we were all remote, and most of us freelance. The team paid occasional visits to the HQ and other affiliate locations, a practice that helped us socialize in real life.

It was lovely and a truly remarkable setup; we were efficient, we had access to talent, had resources and were working for a good cause: an ideal work environment for our kind.

Team independence: a double edge sword?

Our adventure marked the initial steps of what eventually ended up being a growth craze: with time our unit multiplied in size, the department was to house product groups with numerous members each. They needed to do this during a time when their only opportunity to do so was via remote work and people. It provided a wonderful reach to talent all over the world, but at the same time it posed a great challenge for them.

Product teams were made up of internal and external people, even roles traditionally dedicated to internal people were given to consultants. From the get go we were all treated as part of the company. Teams were given plenty of independence, a quality that worked great from a work production perspective. Curiously, the same approach was less fortunate from a governance point of view. Internal issues were expected to be addressed on our own with little guidance from the client company. Conflicts would brew around overlapping roles and responsibilities and some personal behaviors on resolving these. With no executive power to roles individual agendas were pushed into the spotlight. The team’s energy was constantly busy with governance instead of producing work resulting in heightened conflicts without resolution.

Following a heightened period the team was restructured. It resulted in quiet but consequent resentment and trust was significantly lost between operation and management.

Soon, the unit received a top-down command and all digital development must have come to a halt and most external consultants were let go. It was a sad and unnecessary end to a number of collaborations. The company suddenly lost many loyal and dedicated professionals and with their leaving all the investment into their thorough onboarding and ability to create impact in this industry.

How did it happen? How could it have been avoided?

Insights into the fall

A Team needs to be built

How do you have a team assembled from all around the world with mixed employment status and have them perform to the best of their abilities?

In our story the company’s strategy to growth was to hire senior consultants hoping that these people know independent work so they will figure it out on their own.

Independence is key to a professional, but it is only efficient if it comes with authority and trust. Without those and clear roles and responsibilities, independence is the road to chaos: highly trained and highly experienced professionals will try to do their job and without authority they will end up overstepping each other creating conflict without wanting to. Decisions need to be made and somebody must make them.

Where the hypothesis failed was that delivering work in a professional manner or operating a team in a successful dynamic requires different skills and activities.A well-working team requires all members having the same understanding of expectations and the same work-culture in delivering together. Throughout the process we all learned: forming that from the ground up solely from external consultants requires not less, but more framing. Consultants, new to the subject, new to the company and new to each other — on top of which they are located around the world — will take a special process to succeed. Building good dynamics takes time and investment: planning, managing, guidance, effort and shared experience. Underestimating these aspects have a cost: both in losing financial and emotional investment and despite having a great crew not being able to benefit from their talent and potential.

Design management done right — the pillar of product success

An employee or a consultant will thrive when feeling supported and feeling as a valued member of the team. The manager they liaise with provides a big percentage of this impression: they are the ones who make them feel nurtured and taken care of, the support-system through the challenging moments. A good design manager is paramount in guiding the product ship to shore, they are the glue in the system, a link between operations and strategy, leadership and tactical. They know design practices inside out, while knowing and practicing management at the same time.

Working with a mixed team their role is even more important: managing the relationships between external and internal members and making sure they keep all stakeholders in direction despite their different needs. For internal colleagues design managers may be their direct boss but for external consultants they are the link to the mothership. They are the top touchpoint through which information can flow in both directions: they are the link to ensure the external can respond and adapt to changing needs and expectations.

Two things can go wrong with this setup and with our team both happened. One is when there is no continuance in the role (the person changes rapidly in that role) and the other is when someone with not a full competence takes on this responsibility. How is that a challenge?

Manager with little design knowledge

A wonderful manager with low knowledge of design will find itself in reversed roles: it will fall on the designer to educate the manager on professional matters, while their needs are left unmet. Management lacking an all around understanding of professional context will consequently disable them to provide support. If the designer is confident and delivers good work the manager might feel a false sense of safety and further induce independence by practicing an “it’s all good, I’ll let you know when it changes” approach, which despite of the good will, will not work. Instead, it will lead to a decline in motivation for the designer and a loss in frequency of consulting and feedback for the lack of merit of it.

Designer with little management knowledge

A designer turned manager with extensive experience in design, but little at management can give the designer a false sense of comradery which eventually will result in little substance: overwhelmed by the new role, the design manager won’t be able to provide real feedback and constructive criticism or useful guidance for the designer. As a result, the designer may lose touch with useful information from leadership resulting in further distance between company expectations and delivery results.

Due to the rapid growth, personnel was rapidly changing: shifting safety towards uncertainty and the lack of support expedited all deteriorating. These changes further amplified the individual’s responsibility in an already under-managed team. As a result designers were losing the feeling of having a voice; finding themselves in rather a having-to-take orders status, versus having been a valued team member, a fellow professional with valuable opinions.

Insight shortage and micromanagement

Navigating internal politics as an external consultant is a challenging task. Our role is helping create missing links in the system and support them to grow stronger. Internal members often have to take sides, but a consultant’s position allows them to form an overview and enable the company to have a new perspective on their situation. To do this right, one needs insights. Good, fresh, valuable insights.

Internal information flow is the blood in an organization’s veins. If oxygen is cut off from vital organs, they will fail. Internal insights set the tone, the direction and majorly influence priorities and presentation. Without them, regardless of the best market and customer insights and product strategy, the chance for a product to succeed within a company ecosystem significantly decreases. From a team’s perspective it resembles a blind flight: you know the vehicle you are controlling, but have no idea of the weather and the landscape, you have a big chance of crashing.

Within our project, initially daily design work was well fed with valuable insights. This changed while growth was happening and we were dealing with governance conflicts. External members of the team (consultants) started to be treated with lower priority due to their status, despite the roles they had — and with that the team started missing out on crucial background information. Step by step, it led to a stand-alone operation and incorrect judgment of internal situations.

This shaped a vicious circle: both sides were experiencing disappointment and the relationship with leadership started tilting towards micromanagement. Constructive criticism or feedback stopped coming on a regular basis and it formed a place of misunderstanding. Despite loyalty and best efforts trying to steer the product’s ship in the right direction, it became a setup to failure.

Epilogue: Can you have your cake and eat it too?

While on paper our team should have been a stellar success, it became a failure. The growth induced neglect, the lack of organizational development support and the consideration of mixed background nourishment were all destructive forces but there were more high issues that also contributed to the fall — both which could be addressed.

Conflict: friend or foe?

Innovation never happens without change which is not possible without overwriting current realities. Conflict is a natural part of change and some business cultures are more equipped to accommodate that than others. Throughout my career I have worked with clients in Europe, in the USA, in Asia and I see more and more cultures start seeing conflict as a way of growth — an idea especially solidified with the rise of agile.

A close-to-ideal workplace, the Scandinavian work culture does not appreciate conflict well. With our case, conflict was labeled a “problem” throughout our experience. It was seen as unsavory and tried to be avoided. The management it required was largely downplayed which ironically, allowed it to grow and led to the eventual failure and to the mutual loss of investment and value both for the client and for the participants.

Most of us may be poorly equipped to deal with it from the get-go, but it is a matter of skills to learn. In a form of respectful disagreement, conflict can lead to a constructive argument and eventually form a gateway to a shared space of various opinions and points of view. It can create a chance to learn and grow quicker — an idea that resonates in business and product thinking well.

Every company is advised to invest into such practices as they will gain measurable advantage: creating a space where a group of people is willing to reflect on their practices will enable the team to be more than just the sum of its parts.

Mixed teams can be a great advantage to this practice as raising issues can be a challenging responsibility from an employee’s position but is a powerful responsibility from consultants. Which leads us to our last point.

Team of mixed internal and consultant talent: benefits and expectation timelines

Building A-teams from both internal and external talent holds immense opportunity, but companies will have to find a way to respond to the peculiar challenges it brings up. Beyond management and team building, there is another aspect worth considering: the timeline of collaboration.

As a consultant, my engagements usually last 3–6 months, so this project with continuous engagement was new territory. The experience was unique: the company presented a very equalitarian treatment to everyone on board — forgoing the differentiation between internals and externals in order to create a sense of family. This kind gesture — possibly based on the Scandinavian background — came with plenty of merit, but sadly missed considering a few important points: Expectations, privileges and benefits that come with different statuses will change on different timelines and left unaddressed they led to inconvenience and fallout on both sides.

Expectations are shifting with time

Observe, research, analyze, criticize, propose solutions — Behaviors expected and appreciated from consultants in the short run are the ones that possibly make them disruptors in the long run.

2. Internal privileges keep the boat afloat

Privileges associated with being an internal employee — eg.continuous constructive feedback — is what helps keep interests aligned. External consultants without those are not able to meet expectations in the long run.

3. One can’t advise from an internal position

From the perspective of leadership and management, the two statuses (internal and external) have a hierarchy that is irreversible: once treated as an internal member one can’t go back into an advisory position even if they still remain so.

The Cost of non-innovation Human Factor

Our story shows how it was a loss both the company and for the consultants:

During the project, I did pioneering work with data-driven design that later became a flagship pilot project within the company, led an initial research project that created the foundation for all the big topics design started pursuing, set up a design cycle that put some predictability and rhythm on the yearly roadmap, built strong internal and external network-connections within the ecosystem. It felt like a place where things were ideal for being able to thrive by being given the opportunity to work and being appreciated as well as supported.

Having to leave along with fellow highly talented professionals the company lost dedicated talent with know-how, insights, ideas and with a holistic overview of the system and how solutions fit into it, while us, consultants lost the ability to oversee the results of our work, walking away with a knowledge that nobody can benefit from any longer.

Mixed teams hold incredible possibilities, but in order to take full advantage of their potential employment policies must be examined and possibly rewritten.It is a wonderful opportunity for HR and companies to rethink how they set up roles and career paths for the people they work with.To rethink: how might different career paths work well together, be possibly combined (from consultant to employee and back?) and how they might create the most value for all members involved.